MARC to XML to MARC

Gerry McKiernan's email about MARC and XML the other week prompted us to finish up a tool we'd been playing with.

MARCXML is a small utility that "round-trips" MARC records to
well-formed XML and back. It uses a very simple XML format that isn't
designed to contain any knowledge of the MARC records other than the
basic structure. (IE It doesn't know what's allowed to repeat, what's
obsolete, etc.) There is a small DTD, but the converter doesn't require
it in order to rebuild the record.

The resulting XML file can be shown in a browser or edited in a word
processor and then recompiled back into a (structurally) valid MARC
record. The XML parser is built into the converter, so the whole thing
runs as one small program.

A demonstration of the conversion in both directions can be run directly from our web site at http://www.logos.com/marc and the utility can be downloaded for free. We also still have the free MARCType Parser (which parses USMARC records into an annotated human-readable document) online as well as samples of our experimental MARC Report Generator/MARC Query Language.

We'd appreciate any feedback on our tools as well as suggestions on how
to make them more useful. (In particular, we're curious if anyone thinks
the MARC Query Language would be useful as the foundation of a MARC
find/replace utility....)

Also, we've recently set up a resources/links sharing site about digital
libraries and related technologies at http://www.digitallibrary.net which may be of interest.